One aspect of sensory neuroscience is the development of techniques for understanding the functional organization of sensory systems. Comprehensive models of sensory processing can suffer at least in part due to a lack of methods for estimating spike-processing neural circuits in higher brain centers.
Certain neural circuit models and methods for their identification can assume rate-based systems, and can consider both the input (stimuli) and the output (response rates) to be in the continuous domain. However, outputs of most neurons in a sensory system can be sequences of all-or-none action potentials. Furthermore, input signals can be continuous in some cases only for neurons located at the sensory periphery. In contrast, input signals for neurons upstream of sensory neurons can be spatiotemporal spike trains. As such, there is a need to develop a framework for the estimation of both receptive fields in the periphery and of spatiotemporal spike processing upstream.